Credit: Ailytic The Australian wine industry is turning to artificial intelligence to streamline its manufacturing. South Australian tech firm Ailytic has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program to significantly increase production efficiency by optimising machine use.
It uses an AI technique called ‘prescriptive analytics’ to account for all the variables that go into mass-producing wines such temperature, wine changeover and inventory.
The program then creates the best possible operation schedule, allowing companies to save considerable time and money.…

Rice University scientists have determined that no matter how large or small a piece of tobermorite is, it will respond to loading forces in precisely the same way. But poking it with a sharp point will change its strength. Tobermorite is a naturally occurring crystalline analog to the calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H) that makes up cement, which in turn binds concrete, the world’s most-used material. A form of tobermorite used by ancient Romans is believed to be a key to the legendary…

Erik Gomez | Pinterest engineer, IT Client Platform Over the last year, Pinterest IT has been moving away from traditional device management frameworks to an almost completely open source model. Our team’s goal is to make minimal user roadblocks while also maintaining a secure and safe platform for employees. While we’ve done this for years with traditional MDM tools, it often came at a cost. For example, there were increased engineering hours spent writing tool extensions, and code was often…

Many IT shops focus on delivering prepackaged, vendor-based software to employees. As companies begin to offer services to millions or even billions of people, their internal systems, technical environments, and licensing strategies must evolve to give teams the flexibility and speed to keep up with the growing business. For Facebook, and perhaps for any company that operates at our scale, delivering enterprise tools across an organization is becoming an engineering challenge. One area that can occupy countless IT hours is…

Jim Christian SM ’14 is co-founder and vice president of product for Mountain Hub, an app-based network in which people can upload and share critical real-time information about outdoor conditions. Credit: Jim Christian The peace and quiet that envelope a lone hiker on a leaf-riddled trail or a rock climber perched on the top of a cliff seem a world away from the noise of a social media feed. But Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) alumnus Jim Christian SM ’14…

Zhibo Wei, Steven Liao & Jay Kim, Pinterest engineers At Pinterest, we’re committed to delivering a great experience to more than 175 million monthly active users. In addition to core features, like home feed and search, hundreds of in-product experiences are presented to Pinners every day, including new user onboarding flows, user education, tooltips and more. These experiences are built by multiple different product engineering teams. In order to ensure consistency and proper user targeting, we built a system called…

Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have shown they initiate a process called tubulogenesis that is crucial to the formation of blood-transporting capillaries. In microscopic images taken a different times during a weeklong experiment, researchers tracked the changes in cells (green) and cell nuclei (orange) using fluorescent markers. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University In their work toward 3-D printing transplantable tissues and organs, bioengineers and scientists from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have demonstrated a key…

Researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Germany have demonstrated for the first time the phenomena of shape memory and self-healing in gold microparticles. Achieved through defects-mediated diffusion in the particle, the discovery could one day lead to development of micro- and nano-robots capable of self-repair; mechanically stable and damage-tolerant components and devices; and targeted drug delivery. The study, published in the journal Advanced Science, was conducted by doctoral student Oleg Kovalenko and Dr. Leonid Klinger, led by Prof.…

“Aren’t you done with every interesting challenge already?” I get this question in various forms a lot. During interviews. At conferences, after we present on some of our technologies and practices. At meetups and social events. You have fully migrated to the Cloud, you must be done… You created multi-regional resiliency framework, you must be done… You launched globally, you must be done… You deploy everything through Spinnaker, you must be done… You open sourced large parts of your infrastructure,…

Credit: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Houses can be made of wood, as they were in the past – or of concrete, as they are today. To build for tomorrow, the two building methods are being combined: These hybrid structures, which contain both wood and concrete elements, are becoming increasingly popular in contemporary architecture. In the context of the National Resource Programme “Resource Wood” (NRP 66), Swiss researchers have now developed an even more radical approach to combining wood and…